Anonymous made the NYSE threat supposedly to aid in the Wall Street protests (Source: rt.com)

Anonymous threatened to crash the NYSE website and failed to do so

After the list of high-profile attacks launched by hackers throughout 2011, companies are holding up their guard in the face of any threat.

Last week, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) was targeted by hacker group Anonymous, which has launched distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks in the past as a way of protesting government and corporate actions. DDOS attacks crash websites by overwhelming the servers with traffic.

Anonymous posted a YouTube video last week that announced its plan to hack the NYSE website. Anonymous was only threatening the site, not the trading platform where billions of share transactions are processed daily.

"On October 10, the NYSE site shall be erased from the Internet," said the video.

According to media outlets who watched the site throughout the day Monday, the NYSE website began to slow down between 3:35 p.m. and 3:37 p.m. It was investigated, and no signs of an attack were discovered.

In fact, there were no signs of an attack the entire day.

"There was no service interruption," said Ray Pellecchia, NYSE spokesman.

Anonymous threatened to take down the NYSE website supposedly because of the recent protests against Wall Street.

Anonymous also allegedly threatened to destroy Facebook on November 5 due to its behavior with user privacy, but many wondered if the YouTube video was real considering the threat wasn't posted to Anonymous' blog or Twitter account.